Lotteries, time travel, and other trivialities

What would you do if you won the lottery... and

What would you do if you could do it all again

So I think that all of us have, at one point or another, imagined what it would be like if we could go back and do it all over again.  If you suddenly found yourself once again a young child but with all of your adult memories.  Girls you would have dated (or would have definitely NOT dated), jobs you would never have taken, opportunities that you would make sure not to loose. It’s definitely fun to consider but also not likely to ever happen.  But one of my thoughts has always been: “well its fun to think about but if you only had a couple of seconds to react before it happened what would you do?  What would you try to take with you?”

One of the benefits from going back in time would probably be financial: knowing what to invest in when.  The weakness, it seems, comes from having a funds to start with when you arrive.  In most cases it takes money to make money.  Yes, you’ll know major events such as stock market crashes, who wins major sporting events, invest in Apple, and the like; all of which provide you opportunities to make money... if you have money to start with. 

Water Snobbery

Hi, I'm James and I'm a Water Snob.

It all started when I was very young.  I grew up in a small city high in the mountains... a place with wonderful water.  My favorite drink in my youth was tap water, so clean and refreshing, I could drink glass after glass after glass of the stuff.

And then I moved to Phoenix, Arizona.  When I got off the plane and it was BAKING hot.  It was midsummer and the daily temperatures averaged in the 110s and 120s (that's 40-50 degrees for my huge audience of non-American readers).  One immediate result of the heat was that I REALLY needed something to drink.

Ah... a kitchen faucet!  Long the trusty source of revitalizing sustanance.  I grabbed a glass, twisted a nob and... what is that smell?  Yep, that's right, for the split second before the alleged water actually came out of the tap I could already smell it.  Water definitely should not be smellable.  For the first several months I lived in Arizona I lived almost entirely on soda pop, until a roommate who was doing the same thing came back from the dentist with strict orders to stop or all your teeth will all fall out.  Fortunately I was blessed with excellent preventive dental care in my youth so my teeth were fine... but the point was taken.  For the next several years I lived on a mixture of bottled water, or tap water mixed with drink mixes or caps of lemon juice to mask the smell and taste.

Later I ended up in our Nation's Capital (again, for my foreign readers, Washington, DC).  The tap water was a vast improvement to watery sludge of Phoenix but still not what I'd call fit for human consumption.  More soda, drink mixes, and bottled water.

Now I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah... which you would think, since its only 80 miles from where I grew up, would have wonderful water.  After all SLC tap water is so wonderful water that the Salt Lake County Mayor decided to ban bottled water in government offices (not people bringing personal bottles of water, just the big office water coolers) to celebrate our awesome waterness.

So SLC water is amazing right?   Nope.  Better than DC but it still tastes like your drinking water from a swimming pool which always makes me wonder about how many people have peed in this pool before it got to my tap. 

Even more wonderful, SLC water has something in it... I think it's the high mineral content, that makes my tummy very unhappy.  Even if I run it through Brita filters it still gives me a tummy ache to drink it.  After drinking a liter of it, it feels like my stomach has curled itself up into a fetal position while trying to hide under its neighbor the liver while quietly whimpering to itself in pain.   

I don't drink a lot of water anymore.  I miss the aqua of my youth.